Plenty of Men
by Piloter
Summary: A Short Tale In Which the Everyman, B. DeWitt, Private Investigator, Meets a Mysterious Woman Late One Chicago Night. A Reexamination. The Coin of Life. Fateful Pier. The Epitaph.


**Plenty of Men**

The first thing she'd said didn't emerge until it was nothing more than a fleeting epitaph. Maybe it had gone straight past my ears to what was left of my soul. The first thing I'd said was a lot less profound. The city of Chicago in its tender mercies had turned off the electric-something about a bill six months past due-and it was late enough that the lighthouse strobing five-second flashpowder glares into the office window was the only light I had to sit at the old desk, chin in hands, and dream of drowning.

Thus, when the backlit backwards name and occupation on my door swung inward and the trim silhouette in the door was a dead ringer for dead, departed Anna, I found myself rising from blackened depths, mental seaweed hanging thick, to greet the potential client with a simple  
"What?"

Flash.

Manmade lightning and she changed attitudes like a traffic signal, hands on climbable hips and Anna's velvet-and-smoke voice overlaying the steel of a woman who'd seen more than just her share of would-be mountaineers.

"Never mind, Mister DeWitt."

And I could clearly hear every letter in my name dripping lemon-tart bitterness.

"The common wisdom is that everyone needs a vice. You are no longer mine."

She left the door open but if the next flash had cast that shape mid-sashay onto photo paper I'd've given even odds whether Hollywood or the Hayes Code would have had more to say about it.

Now what the hell had she meant by that crack anyhow? Anna was dead, dead and gone since '22. No doubt about it. She'd been dead to me since '21 after trading my engagement ring for the same trip to Niagara Falls but in different company, but I hadn't heard anything afterward until '23. Good old Galloway had bet the fast set in Vice he could get something out of me by bringing the report by on an otherwise unrelated rough-edged inquiry-that meant an open palm instead of a closed fist. By the time the doctors had wired up what he got out of me and his diet expanded beyond soup through a straw, I was out of the pen and back in the office with another black mark on my name. I never even knew if the daughter that killed her was mine or the other bastard's and there wasn't even room in my life for me. The wedding ring, explosively glittering symbol of a shattered dream, bought me the lease and the ragged shift of priorities. Working for people on the same sawn-through rung of the ladder as I was kept me indoors and between that and bread lines I kept alive.

Now they were talking about repealing the Volstead Act and the picture of Anna on my desk was joined by a police photo of a young woman with my eyes and Anna's face looking sullenly unrepentent. The truancy charge was the last anybody had heard of her until Galloway opted to send the report-by post this time-of what they'd fished out of the lake. I was too blue to go down there and wrap my mitts around his neck and squeeze until he popped like a pimple. Too much work. Sometimes when the wrong flash hit, I could see all of the death and none of life in the frames, my mind switching the pictures for the reality. Soft and warm history for moldering present decay.

Nevertheless, she'd been a dead ringer for the departed. Usually clients didn't brave the near-dock streets to come to my office this late, or open the door and have a change of heart. I was this close to hollering where she could try to stick her nose next but something told me she wasn't any stranger to it either. The methodical metronome of her heels kept the same steady pace as it faded out of existance, and there was probably something profound in there if you were lucky enough to not have internalized the metaphor back in the Great War.

Over the water to Europe. Lost and wandering between foxholes, trenches, mud and disease, a lunar landscape of ruin. Doing unto others before they did unto you. Doing your duty to God and the USA that somehow managed to violate the most hallowed moral and secular law, for the sake of the bankers and moneyed elite. Sure didn't help my situation to donate some lead to Fritz, right under the brim of the helmet with a decent scope on the Springfield. The world forgot them but I never did. Somewhere their parents, family, lovers and friends grieved at not knowing. I grieved to know and to be responsible, and awoke from a lake of my own making every night with a throat too raw for whisky to smooth. Not a single face didn't come back. Great dinner parties of the grotesquely dead, myself as the guest of honor. The brightness of Paris afterward, the frenetic gaiety to make up for the lost years, didn't cast a light deep enough to wipe away the shadows of wrong...and the still darker memory of the pleasure in doing a job well, in surviving the grandest, most wretched table game yet, for the highest stakes any player had.

The flash cast the silhouette of the rifle and its bayonet, its muzzle hollow with the lies of duty and honor into monstrous relief against the opposite wall and my head snapped a movie-star-sized shadow from it across the wall, out the door and down the hallway, then back in again and finally out the window. I'd never followed it yet, but then again it was only for the last month that Fritz had given way to water, to a thousand hands holding me down and under. Maybe they were Fritzes. But whether or not I struggled it didn't make the slightest bit of difference. Under the water like Elizabeth. Over the water like Anna.

God knew none of my friends were as close as my bill collectors. I kept in touch with a useful contact or two from the war, knew people in half the swanky joints downtown who owed me some dime-sized favor. Small fry like me. There was no woman. There hadn't been since a thing like that. Once a year, a business transaction, no feelings involved, because the animal inside had to have its day. Scotch or whisky lasted longer than beer, drove the spectres and the waves a little further back, but took longer to afford without losing my home. The second room was supposed to be a waiting room. I had a two dollar cot, ten times overpriced, and used it to wait for morning if I could make it without staggering to the bathroom across the hall and making a mess for poor Otis.

God knew I had nothing but leisure time, most days, and nothing to fill it with. What good is a private dick if he's not in and can't afford a gum-chewing set of gams to answer the phone and throw away the mail? The library held plenty of pulps and if I pulled my hat low enough and my threadbare coat far enough around, nobody could see I was perusing kiddie stuff. Probably thought I was reading something in the Chinese line, but Astounding Stories always took me somewhere else.

The only other thing that really sent me was the hayburner I was paid with a few years back. Somebody who loved Volstead and profited mightily from ineffective temperance had had to go down the river before he got sent up the river and settled his note with keys. The A held the heart of a tiger, or at least a Cadillac 8, and while I never was sure I got as much out of it as when it ran both on and with high-proof it was plenty capable of winnings that slightly exceeded the fuel bill if I drove with reckless disregard for existence. Which was mostly the case. There were a few miles left in the tank and I was saving them for a special occasion.

My parents...everybody had 'em. The most interesting people were constantly getting in and out of feuds with them. The least interesting didn't have them any more and wanted everybody to know it. I was a good country farmboy, trying to make it good in the big city. Letters from Iowa always held a certain well-concealed disappointment that I wouldn't just give up and come home. Raise corn and hogs, that would just come here again and be slaughtered, ground up for momentary survival. No different. No voices that were listened to either. I couldn't make it up, I lived by looking down, I could never go home and see the landscapes without seeing the shellbursts superimposed, and the howling of men and machinery alike, the thock of nails into wood transmuting to bullets all too close. The polite word for my family was 'estranged'. The accurate one was alienated.

Nothing in the bank. Nothing in the office. Nothing depending on me except Bruce, the office rat, who regardless of my occasional stale-bread patronage would be dead by spring from the way his fur already bristled in the long slide into irrelevancy of old age.

Maybe the dame in the door was my guardian angel. I'd survived the farm, the war, Paris, and big-city life amongst the dregs, after all. I would be a bad habit. Lots of women had come to that conclusion. No prospects. Nobody wanted to have a split-level hatstand, two desks, two names on the door. It was always the coin between home-and-pipe respectablility or the gutter. I lived on the edge and spun ceaselessly, restlessly, and if I were my guardian angel I would have shown myself the door years ago.

The flashes felt brighter and as I squeezed my eyes shut against them I could taste the salt tang of blood and water filling my thoughts and my head. She should have gone outside by now. A door opening, a door closing, a car quietly purring at the sidewalk to take her away again or heels faintly against the sidewalk, slipping in and out of ponds of light of other worlds except...nothing. As if she'd vanished into thin air as mysteriously as she'd come.

I...remembered, I thought. The world became a brief kaleidoscope as I wiped away the congealed misery that every young woman and every younger boy eventually came to know, the salty wash of emotions that was more blood than usual this time and I saw all the ways it might have been. A steady stream of cases, a wife and daughter. A fur coat and a touring car. A gun and a knife, a series of faces before I disfigured them, Fritzes but right here at home. Canoodling with the dame, hearts beating in unison and next to each other as we danced in a suite at the Blackstone to music nobody else could hear. A thousand Bookers went on to do things great and terrible. A city in the sky, a city under the sea, getting religion, getting goats, getting organized and disorganized and buoyant and sinking. A thousand Bookers went on to do nothing. To simply exist, growing older and greyer, struggling more and more to merely survive from day to day until a thousand unlamented graves claimed them.

Every man has something that is uniquely his, that he saves and preserves and clings to against all odds. I examined mine and found the gilt had rubbed off, and where words of duty and energy had once shone nothing but rough handling marks and remnants.

I discovered I didn't want it any more.

Bruce would find his way to the larder I left open. A sandwich and a couple apples weren't much, but the level of happiness in the world would briefly increase. My parents would be distantly sad for a while but like right-thinking God-fearing folk they would conclude that God's judgement had been served after all. The only thing I took from the office were my keys. I didn't close the door either. I didn't care what happened after I'd left.

The A did have one last triple-digit run left in it even accounting for the gate. The one driving light left drunkenly shone down on the lake for a last instant, my stomach left behind with the pier as the wheels rocketed off it.

It was then I remembered what the last woman in my life had said first.

"There's always a city."

"There's always a lighthouse."

"There's always another man."

_Author's note: I privately RP an AU Booker, set in the Windy City round about 1933, in as close as I can get to the Chandler/Hammett/Hammer tone. One with a little less broad brutality, but having been just as disillusioned by the Lost Battalion as Wounded Knee. The broad streak of self-destruction is one of the constants-sometimes the difference between life and death can hinge on something as simple as attitudes when the office door is opened and the idea of exploring what happens to a different one when the coin flips a different way seized me one night and burned its way through in one swell foop. Posted publicly by request of Elizabeth's player._


End file.
